Cowboy Taoism: No Country For Old Men

[Warning: pretty much non-stop spoilers]

I was telling a friend recently that I'm in this phase where everything seems to be by the same author. By everything, I mean the usual diet of books, music and movies that I stuff my head with (and then meditate to purge). I’ve been a glutton for inspiration my whole life. But whereas I used to dive in blind to the stimulation pool and see what sticks, lately I’ve settled down a bit with it. Gotten more selective. Now more often than not it feels like the art I need comes to me, or like I find what I was meant to find. So maybe I'm just getting better at picking what to spend my time with and the overlap effect I’ve been noticing is just true works confirming other true works. For instance, I'll catch ideas from the Tibetan Book of the Dead in a Bjork song; or a Christmas card I get might resemble a Murakami story I read last year. This has never been more the case than when I watched No Country For Old Men. A spare, violent western, it seemed brimming not with the expected Americana, but the ancient Chinese wisdom of the Tao and the Mexican mysticism of Don Miguel Ruiz, both of which have not left my nightstand this year.

I loved No Country For Old Men, which was directed and adapted for the screen by the Cohen brothers. It’s a ponderous, haunted little movie that chooses what it says carefully, like the drawling Texans that people its story. It has one of the weirdest shapes of any movie I've seen. It's like an hourglass – the beginning and end are meditative, abstract and still, photographed in gorgeous width; but they bookend a violent middle shot in a gruffer, uglier style and told in the familiar film vocabulary of a suspense thriller.

In the exterior sections, we're in the head of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). He’s been a small-town West Texas lawman for most of his life. Now approaching retirement age he finds himself stuck on the idea of violence. How not all crimes are created equal. He remembers the man he sent to the chair for killing a fourteen-year-old-girl and how that man had said there was no passion or reason behind the murder. He had just done it to do it. As Bell looks closer at the horrors he's seen, violence begins to look like a separate entity. More like a force in nature than the actions of free-willed men. He wonders, is the world going to hell like it feels, or is it all a matter of his perception changing? In an opening voiceover:

I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. You can say it's my job to fight it but I don't know what it is anymore. More than that, I don't want to know. Why, a man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I'll be part of this world.

Sheriff Bell is facing the classic Problem of Evil. His own Garden of Eden. He’s tempted with the kind of knowledge that changes you. As in, sometimes there are things you can learn that you'll wish you could unlearn. This is the precipice he hovers over. He’s experienced enough life to understand what’s happening to his views and that, if he chooses to see evil, evil will then exist for him. He spends most of the movie choosing not to see – when he’s invited to revisit crime scenes in his county that have become the focus of federal investigations, he declines. But No Country For Old Men is the story of Bell’s wearing down in the face of brutality and by the end of the film, when El Paso’s Sheriff Roscoe tries to describe the acts of the killer they’ve been tracking in psychological terms, Bell has given up trying to think of it as a knowable thing.

Roscoe: He is just a goddamn homicidal lunatic, Ed Tom.
Bell: I’m not sure he’s a lunatic.
Roscoe: Well what would you call him?
Bell: I don’t know. Sometimes I think he’s pretty much a ghost.

This brought to mind things I’ve been reading by Don Miguel Ruiz, the strange Mexican mystic whose brilliant esoteric writings on everything from self esteem to human domestication have poured acid on the world view I spent 31 years constructing. Ruiz was an ambitious and successful surgeon born into a long lineage of faith healers and shamans. A combination of a near-death experience and years of reflection led him to abandon his medical career and begin exploring the spiritual teachings of his family. Of all Ruiz’s insights, the one that spoke to me the most was his view of knowledge. I was raised to believe that integrity was an adherence to your beliefs. But Ruiz comes from a completely different perspective: that your beliefs are the problem. Ruiz thinks that we’re all dreaming little personal dreams that combine into one big “dream of the planet.” He says that most of what we believe – our complex bags of concepts and judgment – is wrong. Is a lie. As a way back to truth he suggests, “don’t believe yourself.” And then adds, “and don’t believe me either.” (That last part especially endears him to me.) He compares knowledge to a parasite, sucking on our power and manipulating us to do things that will produce fear in our minds.

The belief system is a Parasite in our mind. The Parasite is a living being made from ethereal energy. To survive, the Parasite feeds on emotions that are created by the human brain. These are emotions that come from fear, anger, sadness, depression, jealousy and victimhood. The Parasite controls the dream. It creates a dream of fear, a nightmare, in order to control the brain which is the factory of emotions. The Parasite controls the production of those human emotions which are necessary for its survival. At the same time, the brain stops producing the emotions it needs for the growth of the soul, which are the emotions that come from love.

When I picture the parasite, I picture Chigurh.

It's impossible to think about No Country For Old Men without conjuring its psychopathic, walking bloodbath Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). The grim image of the pale face and raw-red eyes beneath his sissy pegboy haircut will always be the soul and symbol of the film’s bleak story. Chigurh is a professional hunter of men who is sicked on the trail of a wayward bag of cash and the unlucky hayseed who found it, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). Though technically Chigurh is a professional because gets paid for his dirty work, professional concerns are beside the point. Chigurh is murder. His assignment provides a kind of excuse and opportunity for his rage as it pours unchecked over the practical concerns of the mission. When Chigurh kills, as he does frequently and unstoppably, he does it in an unblinking, steely manner. Like a flesh-and-blood Terminator. But what’s most unsettling is that Chigurh’s machine-like efficiency is offset by watery eyes, which allude to some kind of human frailty. He doesn’t seem heartless as much as unwell.

The Cohen Brothers never bother to explain Anton Chigurh. He is a terrible thing without context. He enters the story from out of nowhere and departs the same way he came in, leaving a trail of carnage along the way. Because the storytellers frame this against Bell’s crisis of perception, it has the effect of making Chigurh seem conjured. A figment of Bell’s fear, a shadow self. (It’s interesting that Bell is called Ed Tom by his friends, which, when spoken in a Texas accent sounds nearly identical to Anton.) Many reviewers of the film described Chigurh as a kind of Angel of Death, a fatal incarnation that is beyond good and evil. But the film goes to great lengths to show Chigurh's humanity – we see him sewing himself up after a gun fight, or picking a petty argument with a gas station attendant. I see Chigurh as being closer to Ruiz's parasite of knowledge. Chigurh is not amoral. He has his reasons for what he does, a code. Only, he can't see that his logic is infected. And like all sick logic, his has a measure of self awareness that never goes anywhere. Sartre said that we actually hate our free will because it's an enormous burden. And Chigurh hates his. He's always trying to get around it, using coin tosses to decide the fate of his victims or making speeches about the nature of chance. Just before he executes Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), they have this exchange:

Chigurh: Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Wells: Do you have any idea how goddamn crazy you are?
Chigurh: You mean the nature of this conversation?
Wells: I mean the nature of you.

Wells can see through the holes in Chigurh's system, which is belief posing as anti-belief. He calls Chigurh crazy, but he doesn't mean that Chigurh is acting without reason. He means that Chigurh's knowledge is so sick that it's now completely devouring Chigurh the organism and everything he touches. Something which is immediately obvious to anybody Chigurh comes across. Lewellyn's wife, Carla Jean, who gets the Chigurh "treatment" at the end of the film, says, "I knowed you was crazy when I saw you settin' there." Carla Jean stands up to Chigurh by refusing to play his coin toss game. She sees that he is only trying to avoid taking responsibility for his actions by pretending that none of us has free will. But Carla Jean thinks, what is the point of pretending that the coin toss has any power when Chigurh created the game in the first place?

I have only one spiritual friend. I think of him this way because he’s the only one who, like me, seems to believe in everything and nothing. Last year he left me his copy of the Tao Teh Ching, a very old book of spiritual Chinese poetry and madness. This friend swears by the Tao and I'm starting to come around myself. As far as I can tell it works on a couple of levels, one as a practical guide to leadership, with lots of mentions of what a Sage would and wouldn't do. But then it goes deeper, riffing on things like Emptiness and Essence in a nearly incomprehensible prose style that hovers on the edges of rationality. It says things like, “Between Heaven and Earth there seems to be a bellows.” The Tao wants us to give up striving, and to be more like nature. One of its best points is about not creating problems where they didn't exist before. You could apply this to the rot and ruin of knowledge. But the Tao comes at it from a more tangible angle.

By not exalting the talented you will cause the people to cease from rivalry and contention.
By not prizing goods hard to get, you will cause the people to cease from robbing and stealing.
By not displaying what is desirable, you will cause the people's hearts to remain undisturbed.

I think the Tao is talking about the creation of false needs. It’s saying that it is possible to create a problem out of thin air.

More Ruiz:

In the mind, we create a whole picture in this bubble of illusion. The mind thinks it has the need for food, water, shelter, clothing, sex. But the mind has no needs at all. No physical needs. The mind doesn’t need food, doesn’t need oxygen, doesn’t need water, doesn’t need sex at all. How do we know this is true? When your mind says, “I need food,” you eat and the body is completely satisfied. But your mind still thinks it needs food. You keep eating and eating and you cannot satisfy your mind with food because that need is not real. The need to cover your body is another example. Yes, your body needs to be covered because the wind is too cold or the sun is too hot. But it’s your body that has the need, and it’s so easy to satisfy the need. When your need is in the mind you can open the closet and it’s full of clothes, but your mind isn’t satisfied. What does it say? “I have nothing to wear.”

No Country For Old Men is saying something about the problems of knowledge, both in the abstract, as Bell wrestles with perception, and in the physical temptations of the senses. I can think of at least three instances in the film where characters are presented with the sudden possibility of money and in all three situations there is instant corruption; a need is created that, seconds before, didn’t even exist:

Lewellyn is out hunting and comes across the site of a drug deal turned massacre. It leads him to a suitcase of money and he takes it, though he knows better and that whoever owns that money is certainly going to come looking for it. Still, the possibility of becoming an instant millionaire is now a “need” for him that trumps all common sense and leads him to put his life at risk. Later, he stumbles, bloody and desperate after his battle with Chigurh, into three teenagers coming back across the bridge from Mexico. He offers one of them money for their shirt, so he can sneak past the border without drawing attention to himself. It’s far more money than the shirt is worth but then, when Lewellyn also asks for one of their half-finished beers to use as a prop, the guy holding the beer tries to milk Lewellyn for more money. And finally, near the film’s finale, when Chigurh emerges in a daze from his car wreck, a bone sticking out of his arm, he mirrors Lewellyn by offering one of two boys who approach him on bikes a hundred dollar bill for his shirt so he can make a sling. Once Chigurh is out of sight, the boys instantly begin fighting about the money, though neither of them had started out on their bike ride expecting it.

The cat and mouse game that Lewellyn and Chigurh play, trying to blast each other to bits across the towns of West Texas, is extremely gripping. But I don't think it is so just for entertainment purposes. We are supposed to take Lewellyn’s side, watching him run for his life as he struggles to keep a bag of money that just happened to come across his path, to satisfy a false need. Lewellyn’s drama, in this sense, was conjured out of thin air. But we all do this and so we identify. The thing about false needs is that they consume our attention and, as the film builds to a violent climax we nearly forget about Sheriff Bell and his ruminations on evil. They seem beside the point. We just want to see if Lewellyn wins. And this is the setup for the most jarring and confusing aspect of the movie. The narrative is suddenly ripped out from underneath us. Lewellyn is killed in a shootout with Mexican bounty hunters. Not only does it have nothing to do with Chigurh, we don’t even get to see it. We only catch a few glimpses of the aftermath through Bell’s eyes. To the viewer, who is by now completely invested, as well as trusting in the conventions of film enough to believe a more linear resolution was coming, it’s extremely frustrating. It’s as if the Cohen brothers are saying, it was never real anyway. Lewellyn’s plight, like knowledge, had a power over us that we allowed.

And then we’re back in Bell’s head as he visits his brother-in-law Ellis, an invalid living in a desert cabin. Ellis used to be a Sheriff’s deputy and lost the use of his legs from a gunshot wound. Bell mentions that the man who shot him just died in prison and asks what he would have done if the man had gotten out.

Ellis: I don't know. Nothin'. Wouldn't be no point to it.
Bell: I'm kindly surprised to hear you say that.
Ellis: All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin’ out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

What Ellis is acknowledging is that vengeance is a problem of knowledge. It won’t change what happened. It can only satisfy a mental need, not a real one. Being a lawman goes far back in Bell and Ellis’s family and, in Ellis’s mind, the violence that to Bell seems to be getting more real every day is nothing new.

Ellis: Your daddy ever tell you how Uncle Mac came to his reward?
Sheriff Bell shrugs.
Ellis: Shot down on his own porch there in Hudspeth County. There was seven or eight of 'em come to the house. Wantin’ this and wantin’ that. Mac went in and got his shotgun but they was way ahead of him. Shot him down in his own doorway. Aunt Ella run out and tried to stop the bleedin. Him tryin’ to get hold of the shotgun again. They just set there on their horses watchin’ him die. Finally one of 'em says somethin in Injun and they all turned and left out. Well Mac knew the score even if Aunt Ella didn't. Shot through the left lung and that was that. As they say.

Then Ellis drives his point home.

Ellis: What you got ain't nothin’ new. This country is hard on people. Hard and crazy. Got the devil in it yet folks never seem to hold it to account.
Bell: Most don't.
Ellis: You're discouraged.
Bell: I'm... discouraged.
Ellis: You can't stop what's comin’. Ain't all waitin’ on you. [The two men look at each other. Ellis shakes his head.] That's vanity.

Beneath the folksy style and cowboy twang of what Ellis is saying are very Eastern ideas. Bell's problems are an illusion in a way. They have more to do with him and the changes in his temperament than any objective assessment of the world. Ellis is saying that the universe is in a state of equilibrium, a great sloshing pan of yin and yang. What he calls "vanity" is a mindstate of egocentric grasping. Buddhists believe that the self is like a mist over water. We make it real by believing in it. If we don't, it evaporates back into the sea of oneness. Violence is a part of the world in flux, but it's no more real at any given moment. Existence is a question of perception. In one scene in the film, Chigurh has just shot the face off a crooked businessman who betrayed him. As the shot man twitches to death on the floor his accountant stands next to Chigurh, quivering from what he just saw, and says, "Are you going to kill me?" Chigurh replies, "That depends. Do you see me?"

The Tao:

Two gave birth to One
One gave birth to Two
Two gave birth to Three
Three gave birth to all the myriad things.

All the myriad things carry Yin on their backs and hold the Yang in their embrace,
Deriving their vital harmony from the proper blending of the two vital Breaths.
Truly, one may gain by losing;
And one may lose by gaining.

What another has taught me let me repeat:
"A man of violence will come to a violent end."
Whoever said this can be my teacher and father.